Belle

Can programming be seen as literary art?

Belle is a small experiment in this space, A tiny push towards programming's own Belles Lettres. Fiddle with the aesthetics of prose and poetry, And give it meaning through rewite rules.

Building

Assuming you have Node.js and npm installed:

$ npm install
$ npm start

Then point your browser to http://localhost:8000. Example programs and documentation are embedded in the small IDE.

Alternatively, you can also run it directly from the web, but that isn't guaranteed to be the same version submitted here: https://qteati.me/belle

Concept and etymology

Belle (/bɛl/), is "beautiful" in French, and in this context is used in the original idea of Belles Lettres---a category of writing concerned with the aesthetics of writing.

Here we're concerned with the aesthetics of programming, and the idea of "programs as works of literary art". Even if it comes at the cost of being functional or practical at all.

Indeed, all programs in Belle have no semantics. At least not out of the box. A program is just an arbitrary collection of text pieces. These text pieces may be given meaning through rewrite rules.

E.g.: a quine program is a program that outputs itself. In Belle we would first write the program:

Echo,
Down the hall,
I wonder,
What shall befall...

That's a valid Belle program. It doesn't do anything because there's no idea of meaning here. So we need to put some rewrite rules before the program:

:rule <any>/0 = @display ^self.

Echo,
Down the hall,
I wonder,
What shall befall...

This rule basically means: "for any piece of text, give it meaning by displaying it". Rewrite rules are applied at the beginning of the program, replacing the content it matched with its body, until no program input remains.

Important note

The parser will break in mysterious ways if you look at it funny.

Licence

Copyright (c) 2021 Q. Released under the permissive MIT licence.

Font icons are by fontawesome.